Museum Louvre

Late closures: The museum is open until 8 p.m. on 28 and 30 December 2023 and 3,4 and 6 January 2024. Please be aware that visitors will be asked to leave the rooms 30 minutes before closing.

The building was extended many times to form the present Louvre Palace. In 1682, Louis XIV chose the Palace of Versailles for his household, leaving the Louvre primarily as a place to display the royal collection, including, from 1692, a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture.[6] In 1692, the building was occupied by the Acadmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Acadmie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which in 1699 held the first of a series of salons. The Acadmie remained at the Louvre for 100 years.[7] During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre should be used as a museum to display the nation's masterpieces.

Museum Louvre

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The museum opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property. Because of structural problems with the building, the museum was closed from 1796 until 1801. The collection was increased under Napoleon and the museum was renamed Muse Napolon, but after Napoleon's abdication, many works seized by his armies were returned to their original owners. The collection was further increased during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and during the Second French Empire the museum gained 20,000 pieces. Holdings have grown steadily through donations and bequests since the Third Republic. The collection is divided among eight curatorial departments: Egyptian Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculpture; Decorative Arts; Paintings; Prints and Drawings.

The Muse du Louvre contains approximately 500,000 objects[8] and displays 35,000 works of art in eight curatorial departments with more than 60,600 square metres (652,000 sq ft) dedicated to the permanent collection.[2] The Louvre exhibits sculptures, objets d'art, paintings, drawings, and archaeological finds. At any given point in time, approximately 38,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are being exhibited over an area of 72,735 square metres (782,910 sq ft). With over 7.8 million visitors in 2022, the Louvre is the world's most-visited museum.[9]

The Louvre museum is located inside the Louvre Palace, in the center of Paris, adjacent to the Tuileries Gardens. The two nearest Mtro stations are Louvre-Rivoli and Palais Royal-Muse du Louvre, the latter having a direct underground access to the Carrousel du Louvre commercial mall.[10]

Before the Grand Louvre overhaul of the late 1980s and 1990s, the Louvre had several street-level entrances, most of which are now permanently closed. Since 1993, the museum's main entrance has been the underground space under the Louvre Pyramid, or Hall Napolon, which can be accessed from the Pyramid itself, from the underground Carrousel du Louvre, or (for authorized visitors) from the passage Richelieu connecting to the nearby rue de Rivoli. A secondary entrance at the Porte des Lions, near the western end of the Denon Wing, was created in 1999 but is not permanently open.[11]

Beginning in 2012, Nintendo 3DS portable video game systems were used as the official museum audio guides. The following year, the museum contracted Nintendo to create a 3DS-based audiovisual visitor guide.[15] Entitled Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre, it contains over 30 hours of audio and over 1,000 photographs of artwork and the museum itself, including 3D views,[16] and also provides navigation thanks to differential GPS transmitters installed within the museum.[17]

The upgraded 2013 Louvre guide was also announced in a special Nintendo Direct featuring Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto demonstrating it at the museum,[18] and 3DS XLs pre-loaded with the guide are available to rent at the museum.[19] As of August 2023, there are virtual tours through rooms and galleries accessible online.

The Cabinet du Roi consisted of seven rooms west of the Galerie d'Apollon on the upper floor of the remodeled Petite Galerie. Many of the king's paintings were placed in these rooms in 1673, when it became an art gallery, accessible to certain art lovers as a kind of museum. In 1681, after the court moved to Versailles, 26 of the paintings were transferred there, somewhat diminishing the collection, but it is mentioned in Paris guide books from 1684 on, and was shown to ambassadors from Siam in 1686.[30]

The Louvre finally became a public museum during the French Revolution. In May 1791, the National Constituent Assembly declared that the Louvre would be "a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts".[31] On 10 August 1792, Louis XVI was imprisoned and the royal collection in the Louvre became national property. Because of fear of vandalism or theft, on 19 August, the National Assembly pronounced the museum's preparation urgent. In October, a committee to "preserve the national memory" began assembling the collection for display.[33]

For most of the 19th century, from Napoleon's time to the Second Empire, the Louvre and other national museums were managed under the monarch's civil list and thus depended much on the ruler's personal involvement. Whereas the most iconic collection remained that of paintings in the Grande Galerie, a number of other initiatives mushroomed in the vast building, named as if they were separate museums even though they were generally managed under the same administrative umbrella. Correspondingly, the museum complex was often referred to in the plural ("les muses du Louvre") rather than singular.[citation needed]

The rule of Napoleon III was transformational for the Louvre, both the building and the museum. In 1852, he created the Muse des Souverains in the Colonnade Wing, an ideological project aimed at buttressing his personal legitimacy. In 1861, he bought 11,835 artworks including 641 paintings, Greek gold and other antiquities of the Campana collection. For its display, he created another new section within the Louvre named Muse Napolon III, occupying a number of rooms in various parts of the building. Between 1852 and 1870, the museum added 20,000 new artefacts to its collections.[51]

The Louvre narrowly escaped serious damage during the suppression of the Paris Commune. On 23 May 1871, as the French Army advanced into Paris, a force of Communards led by Jules Bergeret [fr] set fire to the adjoining Tuileries Palace. The fire burned for forty-eight hours, entirely destroying the interior of the Tuileries and spreading to the north west wing of the museum next to it. The emperor's Louvre library (Bibliothque du Louvre) and some of the adjoining halls, in what is now the Richelieu Wing, were separately destroyed. But the museum was saved by the efforts of Paris firemen and museum employees led by curator Henry Barbet de Jouy.[52]

Following the end of the monarchy, several spaces in the Louvre's South Wing went to the museum. The Salle du Mange was transferred to the museum in 1879, and in 1928 became its main entrance lobby.[53] The large Salle des Etats that had been created by Lefuel between the Grande Galerie and Pavillon Denon was redecorated in 1886 by Edmond Guillaume [fr], Lefuel's successor as architect of the Louvre, and opened as a spacious exhibition room.[54][55] Edomond Guillaume also decorated the first-floor room at the northwest corner of the Cour Carre, on the ceiling of which he placed in 1890 a monumental painting by Carolus-Duran, The Triumph of Marie de' Medici originally created in 1879 for the Luxembourg Palace.[55]

From the late 19th century, the Louvre gradually veered away from its mid-century ambition of universality to become a more focused museum of French, Western and Near Eastern art, covering a space ranging from Iran to the Atlantic. The collections of the Louvre's muse mexicain were transferred to the Muse d'Ethnographie du Trocadro in 1887. As the Muse de Marine was increasingly constrained to display its core naval-themed collections in the limited space it had in the second-floor attic of the northern half of the Cour Carre, many of its significant holdings of non-Western artefacts were transferred in 1905 to the Trocadro ethnography museum, the National Antiquities Museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the Chinese Museum in the Palace of Fontainebleau.[56] The Muse de Marine itself was relocated to the Palais de Chaillot in 1943. The Louvre's extensive collections of Asian art were moved to the Guimet Museum in 1945. Nevertheless, the Louvre's first gallery of Islamic art opened in 1922.[citation needed]

During World War II, the Louvre conducted an elaborate plan of evacuation of its art collection. When Germany occupied the Sudetenland, many important artworks such as the Mona Lisa were temporarily moved to the Chteau de Chambord. When war was formally declared a year later, most of the museum's paintings were sent there as well. Select sculptures such as Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo were sent to the Chteau de Valenay.[58] On 27 August 1939, after two days of packing, truck convoys began to leave Paris. By 28 December, the museum was cleared of most works, except those that were too heavy and "unimportant paintings [that] were left in the basement".[59] In early 1945, after the liberation of France, art began returning to the Louvre.[60]

On 18 November 1993, Mitterrand inaugurated the next major phase of the Grand Louvre plan: the renovated North (Richelieu) Wing in the former Finance Ministry site, the museum's largest single expansion in its entire history, designed by Pei, his French associate Michel Macary, and Jean-Michel Wilmotte. Further underground spaces known as the Carrousel du Louvre, centered on the Inverted Pyramid and designed by Pei and Macary, had opened in October 1993. Other refurbished galleries, of Italian sculptures and Egyptian antiquities, opened in 1994. The third and last main phase of the plan unfolded mainly in 1997, with new renovated rooms in the Sully and Denon wings. A new entrance at the porte des Lions opened in 1998, leading on the first floor to new rooms of Spanish paintings.[citation needed] 17dc91bb1f